Deadline (40 page)
Authors: Mira Grant
Tags: #Fiction, #Horror, #Dystopian, #Science Fiction, #Action & Adventure, #FIC028000
Maggie’s bulldogs were waiting on the front lawn, and they mobbed our feet as soon as we got out of the van. Mahir backpedaled frantically, winding up sitting on the armrest of the passenger seat with his feet drawn up, out of reach of inquisitive noses. This didn’t stop them from jumping at his shoes, yapping in their oddly
sonorous small-dog voices. “Good lord, dont you keep these things leashed?”
“Not when they’re at home,” Maggie replied. “Bruiser, Butch, Kitty, down.” The three dogs that had seemed the most intent on getting to Mahir dropped to all fours and trotted over to Maggie, tongues lolling.
“They grow on you,” I said, leaning past Mahir to grab his bag. It was deceptively heavy. I’d been expecting it to weigh maybe twenty pounds, but it was heavy enough to throw me off balance for a moment. “Jeez, dude, what’s in this thing, bricks?”
“Computer equipment, mostly. I hope you have a few shirts I can borrow. It seemed like a poor idea to travel with more than I could fit in a single bag.” Mahir watched the dogs warily as he slipped out of the van and edged toward the house. The dogs, for their part, stayed clustered around Maggie, looking up at her with adoring eyes.
“You can borrow my shirts, my man, but you’re going commando before you’re borrowing my boxers.” I slung my arm around his shoulders and started walking toward the kitchen door. “Coffee awaits, unless you’d rather have tea. You look like shit, by the way.”
“Yes, I’ve gathered,” said Mahir wearily. “Tea sounds fantastic.”
He kept trudging onward as I glanced back at Maggie. Kelly had emerged from the van and was standing next to her, frowning thoughtfully. Maggie nodded, signaling her understanding. I answered her nod with a brief, relieved smile. I needed a few minutes alone with Mahir before he fell into an eight-hour coma, and Maggie was telling me she’d keep Kelly out of the way until I was ready for her.
The kitchen was empty. Alaric and Becks were still
off-site, and all the bulldogs were outside, probably harassing Maggie into playing catch with them. I guided Mahir to a seat at the table. “You have a tea-based preference? Maggie has something like five hundred kinds. I think they all taste like licking the lawnmower, so I really can’t make recommendations.”
“Anything that isn’t herbal will be fine.” Mahir collapsed into the chair, his chin dipping until it almost grazed his chest. “Soy milk, no sugar, please.”
“You got it.” I kept one eye on him as I filled the electric kettle and got down a mug.
He’s worn out.
“I got that,” I muttered. Mahir raised his head enough to blink at me. I offered an insincere smile. “Sorry. I was just—”
“I know what you were doing. Hello, Georgia. I hope your ongoing haunting hasn’t driven your brother too far past the edge of reason to justify this visit.”
There’s no such thing as ghosts,
said George, sounding peevish.
The idea of getting into that particular argument was too ludicrous to consider, especially given my position. I got the soy milk from the fridge instead, answering, “George says hey. Your tea will be ready in just a minute. Want to tell me why you decided to be a surprise? We could’ve at least made up the couch for you, if we’d known that you were coming.”
“I didn’t want to broadcast it anywhere,” Mahir said, with a calm that was actually chilling. This wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment decision. I hadn’t really expected it would be, but still, the tone of his voice, combined with the exhaustion in his face, made me want to put away the tea and break out the booze. “I purchased a flight from Heathrow to New York via an actual travel
agency, rather than online, and flew from there to Seattle, where I switched from my own passport to my father’s and caught a flight to Portland. From there, I took a private flight to Weed. The gentleman who owns the plane took payment in cash, and his manifest will show that I was a young woman of Canadian nationality visiting the state for a flower show.”
“How much did that cost?”
“Enough that you should be deeply grateful I’m paid in percentage of overall site income, rather than drawing a salary, or you’d owe me quite a bit of money.” Mahir removed his glasses in order to scrub at his eyes with the heel of his hand. “I’m not going to be useful much longer, I’m afraid. I’ve been awake damned near a day and a half as it is.”
“I sort of figured.” The kettle began to whistle. I turned it off, dropping a teabag from Maggie’s disturbingly large collection into a mug and covering it with water before walking the mug and soy milk over to Mahir. “Give me the short form. How bad is it?”
“How bad is it?” Mahir took a moment to doctor his tea, not speaking again until he was settled with both hands wrapped firmly around the mug. Looking at me steadily, he said, “I took the data you gave me to three doctors I was reasonably sure were reputable. One laughed me out of his office. Said if anything of the sort were going on, he’d have heard about it, since the trending evidence would be virtually impossible to overlook. Further said that if anything of the sort were going on, the national census would reflect it. I challenged him to prove that it didn’t.”
“And?”
“He stopped taking my calls three days later. I’d wager because the national census reflected exactly
what he said it wouldn’t.” Mahir sipped his tea, grimaced, and continued: “When I went to confront him about this in person, he was gone—and he didn’t leave a forwarding address.”
Well, shit,
said George.
“I had more luck with the second doctor I approached—largely, I think, because he was Australian and didn’t really give two tosses what the local government thought of his work. He said the research was sound, if a bit overly dramatic, and that he’d rather like a chance to test its applications in a live population.”
“It had applications?” I asked, mystified.
“In the sense that… Well, look, it’s sort of like the research they were doing on parasites at the turn of the century. They found quite a few immune disorders that could be controlled by the introduction of specialized parasites, because the parasites provided a sufficient distraction for the immune system as a whole. They kept the body from attacking itself. Part of what makes Kellis-Amberlee so effective is that it acts like a part of the body—it’s with us all the time, so our immune systems don’t th. There’d be no point; they’d rip us apart trying to kill it. The trouble is that when the virus changes states, the body still doesn’t think of it as an enemy. It still regards it as a friendly component.”
I frowned. “You lost me.”
“If the body regards the sleeping virus as a part of itself, it isn’t prepared to fight the virus when it wakes. But people who somehow survive a bout with the activated virus—those who get exposed when they’re too small to amplify, for example, or those with a natural resistance—can ‘store’ a certain measure of the live virus in themselves, like a parasite. Something that teaches the body what it’s meant to be fighting off.”
“So this dude wanted to, what, go expose a bunch of kangaroos and watch to see what happened as they got bigger?”
“Essentially, yes.”
“What happened with him?”
“He got deported on charges of tax evasion and improper work permits.”
Silence stretched between us as I considered what he was saying—and what he wasn’t. Even George was quiet, letting me think. Finally, I asked, “What about the third guy?”
“His files are in my bag.” Mahir looked at me levelly as he sipped his tea. “He read the files. Three times. And then he called me, told me his conclusions and where he’d sent his data, hung up the phone, and shot himself. Really, I’m not certain he had the wrong idea.”
“What… what did he say?”
“He said that were we braver and less willing to bow to the easy path, we might have had India back a decade ago.” Mahir put his cup down and stood. “I’m tired, Shaun. Please show me where I can sleep. You can read what I’ve brought you, and we’ll discuss it later.”
“Come on.” I stood and started for the hallway. “You can use my room. It’s not huge, but it’s quiet, and the door latches, so you shouldn’t wake up with any surprise roommates.”
“That’s a relief,” he said, following me up the stairs. His presence, strange as it was, felt exactly right, like this was exactly what had to happen before we could finish whatever it was we’d started.
We were all refugees now. None of us would stop running until all of us did.
It’s better to go out with a bang and a press release than with a whimper and a secret.
—G
EORGIA
M
ASON
Fuck this. Let’s just blow some shit up.
—S
HAUN
M
ASON
George and I never technically knew our birthdays. The doctors could estimate how old we were and make some educated guesses about our biological parents, but it really didn’t matter. We knew we were born sometime in 2017, toward the end of the Rising, when most of North America had been taken back from the infected, because the doctors said so. We knew she was older by about six weeks. Everything else was details, and details weren’t important. Not to me. What was important was that I had her, and she had me, and we had each other, and that meant we could face anything the world threw at us. Sometimes I was even arrogant enough to think the Rising happened so we could be together.
It’s as good an explanation as any.
As of today, no matter when my birthday really is, I’ve had a birthday without George. As of today, I’ve spent a year going to sleep and waking up in a world she isn’t in, a world that seems meaningless because she’s never going to make it mean anything ever again. I was always sort of afraid she’d turn suicidal when I died. I asked her once if she ever worried about me like that.
“You’re already suicidal, you asshole,” she said, and laughed. Only it turns out she was wrong, because losing her made me more careful about almost everything. I miss her every day. I miss her every
minute
. But if anything happens to me, she may never get the ending she deserves, and I refuse to be selfish enough to die before I’m finished taking care of the things she left behind.Happy birthday, George. You made me better than I could ever have been without you, and you hurt me worse than I could ever have been hurt by anybody else.
I love you. I miss you. And I’m starting to get the feeling that I’ll see you pretty soon, because I’m starting to feel like, maybe, things are coming to an end.God, I miss you.
—From
Adaptive Immunities
, the blog of Shaun Mason, June 20, 2041
Anybody who messes with Shaun is messing with me. And of the two of us, I swear, I am the one you do
not
want to mess with. He’ll kill you. But I will make you sorry, and I will make you pay.Trust me. I’m a journalist.
—From
Postcards from the Wall
, the unpublished files of Georgia Mason, originally posted June 20, 2041
A
laric, what’s your twenty?” Silence answer
ed me. I bit back a snarl and tried again: “Alaric, where are you?” Getting mad at him for not knowing the weird mix of military and ham radio pidgin used by the Irwin community was pointless. That didn’t stop me from doing it.
This time he answered, his voice coming clear and easy through the phone: “I’m finishing up my edits while Becks does some final recon for her report.”
“Not an answer.” I raked a hand through my hair, watching Maggie try to guide Kelly through the steps required to mix pancake batter. Either Kelly was the worst cook in the world or Maggie was really shitty at giving instructions. It could have gone either way. “Where are you, exactly?”
“Down near Mount Shasta.” My silence must have told Alaric he needed to give me more information, because he added, “About an hour out. Why? Do you need us to stop at the store or something on our way back in?”
Back when Buffy was alive, we could trust our
network against anyone on the planet, including the CIA. Our security isn’t that stellar anymore, but thanks to upgrades cobbled from Maggie’s house system, Becks’s jury-rigging skills, and Alaric’s computer know-how, we’re pretty stable. Stable enough for what I was about to say, anyway: “Mahir’s here.”
It was Alaric’s turn to go briefly silent. Finally, he said, “Mahir sent in a report?”
“No, dumb-ass, Mahir’s
here
. Mahir is asleep upstairs in the guest room I’ve been using. He showed up with pretty much the clothes on his back and a suitcase full of research, and he looks like hammered shit.”
Maggie looked over. “Is that Alaric? Tell him to stop by the House of Curries on his way home. I’m going to send in an order.”
“Got it. Alaric, Maggie says—”
“I heard her,” he said, managing to sound annoyed and astonished at the same time. “You’re serious, aren’t you? Mahir is actually
here
.”
“Yeah, that’s what I’ve been saying.” Alaric began swearing. I listened, impressed. I hadn’t realized he knew that much Cantonese. I let him go for a few minutes, then interjected, “You kiss your mother with that mouth?”
Play nice with my Newsies, or I swear I’m going to make you sorry,
said George flatly.
“I am being nice.”
Luckily, Alaric was still swearing, finishing off an elaborate phrase that started in Cantonese and switched to English as he said, almost wonderingly, “—son of a chicken-fucking soy farmer and a diseased convention-center security guard. How did he
get
here? Is he all right? Are we going to need to move again?”
“I’d rather wait and explain everything to you and
Becks at the same time. Right now, he’s exhausted but I’m pretty sure nobody’s been shooting at him—yet, anyway—and that’s something else I’d like us all talk about at once. So when can you be here?”
There was a clattering sound as Alaric shoved his keyboard away, knocking something to the van floor in the process. “Give me ten minutes to get Becks back here, and I’ll break a couple of dozen speed limits getting over to you.”
“Don’t forget to pick up dinner,” called Maggie.
“Maggie says—”
“I heard her. Do you need anything else?”
“Just drive safely, don’t get pulled over, and don’t crash into anything. If we’re going to die horribly, we’re all going to do it together.”
“Great pep talk, boss. Very touching. I’ll always remember the day when you told me not to drive into a tree on the way home.” Alaric said something caustic sounding in Cantonese—what little I remembered from my course on field communications made me think he’d just called me a goat fucker—and hung up.
Smirking, I pulled off my ear cuff and dropped it into my shirt pocket, twisting to face Maggie and Kelly. “They’re on their way, and yes, Maggie, Alaric’s going to pick up dinner. He said they’d be about an hour. Why are we ordering dinner if you’re making pancakes?”
“It gives me something to do with my hands, and Mahir’s got to be hungry after becoming an international fugitive from justice.” Maggie handed Kelly another egg. “I’ll tell the house to transmit our normal order, plus three.”
“Fair enough.” I got up and crossed to the fridge, pulling out a can of Coke. “Make me a couple of pancakes, will you?”
“Already planning to.” Maggie took the bowl from Kelly. She looked inside, sighed, and started picking bits of eggshell out of the batter. “I’m assuming things are pretty bad for him to have come to us this way.”
“I don’t know that they’re any worse than they were yesterday, but I think they’re about to get pretty bad, yeah.” I couldn’t stop thinking about Mahir’s casual mention of divorce papers. I’d given his wife shit since the day they got married, but that didn’t mean I wanted her to leave him. He was risking everything to be here with us. Hell, he’d been risking everything since the day he agreed to come back to the team. I just hoped we could live up to the degree of faith that he was putting in us, because I really wasn’t sure anymore.
Just keep breathing,
advised George.
It’s too late for any of us to turn back now.
“Got that right,” I muttered, and cracked open the Coke, taking a drink before asking, “Doc, what do you know about viral parasitism?”
Kelly stared at me. “What?”
“It was something Mahir said before he went upstairs to crash—the virus acts like a parasite in people with reservoir conditions, and that teaches their bodies how to cope with it better. I’m not quite sure what he meant, but I figure you’ll be able to translate for us when we sit down for the big meeting.”
“I…” Kelly frowned thoughtfully. “It’s not a
common
theory, but I’ve heard it before. It basically says that the virus can change its behavior, go from being a strict predator to a sort of symbiotic parasite.”
“Isn’t that what both source viruses were originally supposed to do?” asked Maggie, turning on the stove. She began pouring dollops of batter onto the griddle, filling the room with the hot, sweet scent of cooking
pancakes. “We were supposed to catch them and then keep them forever, like… I don’t know, weird immortal hamsters that cured cancer.”
“Only these hamsters developed rabies.” I sipped my Coke. “If it’s something people already know about, is there any reason for someone to get deported for studying it? Viral parasitism, I mean. Not hamsters.”
“No,” Kelly said, firmly. “There’s no good reason for someone to be deported for studying viral parasitism.”
“That’s what I thought.” I leaned back in my seat, sipping my Coke, and watched Maggie make pancakes. Kelly went quiet, a speculative expression on her face. I could almost see the wheels turning as she got herself a glass of water and sat down across from me, both of us waiting for the pancakes to be ready.
Mahir’s arrival changed everything. We’d been treading water, writing our reports, studying the material we got from Dr. Abbey, and waiting for something to happen, because something always happened when we got too comfortable. We’d long since passed the point where we could back out safely—maybe we passed that point the day George and I decided it would be a good idea to go out for the Ryman campaign. I don’t know—but that didn’t mean we’d exactly been hurrying toward the end game. We’d been waiting to see what would happen next. Now that Mahir was with us, it was time for things to start moving again.
I wasn’t ready. I don’t think any of us were, or really could be. I just knew that it was too damn late to back out. It had been too late since George died.
Maybe it was too late before that, and we couldn’t see it. I don’t know.
Mahir hadn’t come downstairs by the time Alaric and Becks showed up. The security system announced
their approach long before the familiar growl of the van’s engine became audible. Maggie had plenty of time to clear away the mess from the pancakes and set out dishes for dinner. “Shaun, go wake our guest,” she said, starting to rummage for forks. I blinked at her, and she grinned. “I figure he’s likely to hit someone if he’s startled, and he’d probably feel bad if he hit a girl.”
I couldn’t argue with that—it was too true—and so I grunted my assent, finished off the last of my Coke, and went trudging up the stairs to the room that had been mine until just a few hours before. The door was shut, and there were no signs of motion from the other side. I raised my hand, hesitating before I actually brought it down in a knock.
“He looked exhausted,” I said.
We’re all exhausted,
George replied.
He needs to explain things sooner or later.
As soon as he explained all the way, any chance we had of postponing the future would be gone. It would end when he opened his bag and pulled out the files he hadn’t shown me yet, and there would be no taking it back, because there never is when the truth gets involved. “Can’t it be later?” The plea in my voice surprised us both, I think, me more than her; George has always known me better than I know myself. I used to do the same favor for her.
It already is,
she said, quietly.
She was right, and because she was right, I brought my hand down and knocked on the guest room door. “Yo, Mahir. Alaric and Becks are here with dinner.”
There was no response.
I knocked again, harder this time. “Mahir! We can sleep when we’re dead, my man!” Part of me couldn’t
help remembering how bleak he’d looked, how deep the circles under his eyes had been. If we can sleep when we’re dead…
Stop it. You’re just freaking yourself out, and that’s not going to do anyone any good. Knock again.
I didn’t knock: I hammered.
“Mahir!”
The door opened. Mahir was still dressed, his clothes no more wrinkled than they’d been before—they’d long since passed the point where a little thing like a nap was going to do anything to hurt them—and his hair was sticking up in uneven spikes, making him look like some sort of apocalyptic prophet. “Is it morning already?” he asked. Exhaustion thickened his accent, making it border on unintelligible. “I’d murder for a cuppa.”
“Not sure what that is, but there’s coffee and tea downstairs. Also dinner. Maggie had Becks and Alaric swing by the House of Curries on their way back from whatever the fuck it is they were doing out there.” I probably should have cared more about what my team was up to when they weren’t working directly on the whole “possible globe-spanning conspiracy” thing, but to be honest, I didn’t have the time or the energy. I trusted them not to get themselves killed while I wasn’t looking. That was all I had left to give them, and it needed to be enough.
“Right.” Mahir rubbed a hand through his hair, doing nothing to improve its spiky disarray. “Is there someplace I can wash my face and slap on a couple of stimulant patches before I have to come down and face humans?”
“Bathroom’s across the hall.”
“Brilliant.” He offered me a wan, distracted smile and stepped into the hall, heading for the bathroom. I
put a hand on his elbow. He stopped, blinking at me. “Yes?”
“I’m glad you’re here, even if it does mean the shit’s finally hitting the fan,” I said, and hugged him.
George and I weren’t raised to be physically demonstrative. Having parents who treat you as a ratings stunt will do that. Mahir knew that. There was a pause no longer than the time it took for him to catch his breath, and then he was hugging me back, shoulders sagging slightly as he let go of some weight I wasn’t quite aware of yet, but doubtless would be soon.
“Thank you,” he said. His smile as he let me go was a little stronger. I turned to head downstairs as he walked into the bathroom, shutting the door behind himself.
The air downstairs smelled like hot curry, garlic naan, and the sweet, pasty nothingness of white rice. Maggie was unpacking bulging paper sacks from the House of Curries onto the counter while Alaric, Becks, and Kelly sat at the table, trying to stay out of her way. The bulldogs were gone, and the connecting door to the front room was closed, indicating the location of their banishment.
Hail, hail, the gang’s all here,
said George, quietly.
“Yeah,” I muttered, pausing in the doorway and watching them. Becks was hiding a laugh behind her hand, probably in response to something Alaric had said. Maggie kept rocking onto her toes, like she was dancing to a private beat. Even Kelly was relaxed, sitting in her chair and watching the others with a faint, puzzled smile on her face. This was my team. Maybe it wasn’t the one I would have put together on my own—out of all of them, Becks was the only one I really trusted in the field, and she was also still the one I had
the most trouble talking to. Alaric was never actually field certified, since the shit hit the fan while he was still prepping for his tests, and Maggie had never needed to be, being a Fictional and all.
Footsteps behind me signaled Mahir’s approach. I turned to face him, asking, “Hey, you’re cleared for fieldwork, right?”
Mahir frowned at me. He’d slicked back his hair and done something to wipe away most of the more visible signs of exhaustion. He hadn’t been kidding about the stimulant patches. He’d pay for that later. Then again, we were going to be paying for a lot of things later, assuming we lived that long.
“In the United Kingdom and European Union, yes, in the United States, no, although I can travel on my U.K. license for up to ninety days as a visiting journalist. Why?”